Thoughtful Thursday Week 7 – Getting the Flu

My son got the flu last week. We don’t know where, of course. But we had been out almost every day of the week for different activities. The doctor told us to keep him out of school through Thursday. I told her he was homeschooled. She said, “The question is, where did he get the flu?”

I informed her that we had seen people virtually every day of the week before: group violin lesson, Adventurer Club, Library Story Time, church, The Muse… She took it all in. She was going through a paradigm shift in her mind and it was visible on her face.

Homeschooled kids do get out… And they do get the flu… But even if you did not have all these activities, they would be accompanying their parents to the grocery store, at the very minimum, or to church…

Oh well. Some things don’t change. People will always discover new things about homeschooling which change their perspective 180 degrees.

So we cancelled LEGO Club, craft time, violin lesson, piano lesson, and all the other things we had going on this week, and stayed home. We actually did quite a few activities which counted as school. I read to them several pages in the animal encyclopedia and then asked them to tell me a few interesting things. We worked on history crafts and activities. We re-read the readers (all 40 of them) we used for my son’s reading lessons one year ago. My daughter has now claimed them as her own, as she knows she will start kindergarten next fall and she will use them.

We re-visited Petra Lingua, which we have sort of abandoned a few months ago when we canceled French Play Group. We brought our account from 25% complete to 40%. Not bad for two sickly kids (my daughter did get some flu-like symptoms as well later in the week).

We read quite a bit more than we usually do, because they had no energy to do much and I had to entertain them somehow. We keep screen time to a maximum of 30 minutes per day. What else was I to do but read to them, right?

So even in the case of the flu, homeschooling comes out a winner. We spend more time together, read more, and continue to study. There’s no need to worry about the number of sick days taken or getting behind in our lessons.